Small tree, big power outage

BY BRENT FOX

The Advertiser

NovaNewsNow.com

Just one tree – and not a very large one –caused a power outage that deprived northeastern Kings County of electrical service most of Thursday.

Power went off at about 8:10 a.m. and remained unavailable until after noon.

Nova Scotia Power Incorporated spokesperson Glennie Langille told The Advertiser just prior to 3 p.m. that service had been restored. It had affected 3,600 customers in the area served by the Hillaton substation.

The power was off in Canning, Sheffield Mills, Scott’s Bay, Medford and adjacent communities.

Langille said it’s a big story and a little story. The big story is it was all caused by high winds and trees. Power was off in a number of mainland Nova Scotia centres during the day due to trees falling on power lines.

In northeast Kings, however, it was a smaller story. “It all came down to one little poplar tree.”

A piece of the tree blew off and fell into the adjacent Hillaton substation, setting off a series of events and reactions that culminated in the large outage.

“It was a fairly lengthy outage,” Langille said, and it took a long time to restore the service. Langille noted that dealing with such an incident is different from just hauling trees of a power line.

“When you have damage to a substation,” she said, “there are a number of things to do to bring it back up safely.”

Langille said there were two brief outages in New Minas as crews attempted to reroute service.

Canning resident Ivan Smith called the story in to The Advertiser a few hours after the outage began, saying, “it’s an inconvenience for all.”

It was frustrating, too. Smith had called the NSPI outage line at 9:30 a.m. and was informed that the estimated power restoration would be 10:15 a.m. When that didn’t happen, he called again at 10:45 a.m. to find that the estimate had been set back to 3 p.m.

“It all started with one tree,” Langille said. “That had to be the story of the day. One tree had a pretty big impact.”